Tag: online services

It’s the combination of bots and machine learning that holds the key: Think of an assembly line system pushing out barbecue equipment.

I’m not sure if there will be a human decision between them, but I think as we become more comfortable with the machines’ decisions, we’ll give them more control of the process.

As a form of decision support, productivity expert Carl Pullein thinks that “machine learning and artificial intelligence [will move] towards creating productivity tools that can schedule your meetings and tasks for you and to be able to know what needs to be done based on your context, where you are and what needs to be done.”

If everyone in the local area has a smart fridge, that same supermarket would be able to make a better decision about how much water to keep stocked.

Companies like Alphabet are already working on it, with projects like DeepMind at the forefront of AI and machine learning technologies.

Google I/O is ostensibly about the future of Android, but that changed in 2016 when CEO Sundar Pichai put the AI-powered Google Assistant and machine learning at the forefront, a trend that continued at this year’s show.

Google unveiled new tools to make interactions like purchases seamless, opening the door for the Assistant to become a money-making platform for developers.

It started when the Google Assistant debuted in the less-than-popular chat app Allo, which launched simultaneously on iPhone and Android.

Now that developers can write Actions for the Assistant, it effectively turns the iPhone into an extension of Google’s existing platforms.

Rather, Google is pushing hard to turn Android developers into Google Assistant developers, Google Home Actions developers and web developers using the latest tools available in Chrome.

By now, many of us have heard about or might even own one of the popular, sleek multi-functional voice-first devices, such as the Amazon Echo, also known as “Alexa”, the name used when waking the device to give a verbal command.

This joke is terrible for many reasons, not the least of which is that I ended up anthropomorphized a digital device, which may be one of the biggest issues with this devices.

Related: There’s No Doubt That Amazon Alexa Is the Next Big Thing

First, according to Voice Labs Voice Report for 2017, 6.5 million voice-first devices — defined as an always-on piece of hardware utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) with primarily a voice interface, both for input and output — were shipped in 2016.

Here are predictions for the strategies of just the big players:

Related: Top 10 Best Chatbot Platform Tools to Build Chatbots for Your Business

The crazy thing is that even with the potential for 24 million devices to be in our homes soon, the potential impact still remains remarkably unclear.

Related: How to Create a Facebook Messenger Chatbot For Free Without Coding

One thing is for certain, the popularity of these devices is certain to grow.